Sift

Bowls around town — Check it out — literally

2013-05-16T22:49:04Z

Libraries are for books, right? Hardly. Public libraries offer plenty of other material for checkout, ranging from the fairly obvious (movies) to the technologically adept (book downloads) to the downright surprising (tools, art, musical instruments, even therapy dogs).

Here in Portland, Oregon, there’s a small library (Kitchen Share SE) that only checks out kitchen tools. And right now the county library is promoting an unusual project: checking out a wooden box with a ceramic bowl and a blank book.

The project — held in conjunction with a bowl-focused exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Craft — is designed to get library patrons to share recipes. Driven by the artist Michael J. Strand, the goal is to cook something, serve it in the bowl, and write down the recipe in the book.

Dubbed "Bowls Around Town," the box is available for checkout through September 21.

from Sift

Edible parks — Free fruit grows across the land

2013-05-14T18:27:20Z

Once upon a time — say, a few years ago — the free-food trend was all about urban foraging: spotting, mapping, and harvesting food (mostly fruit from trees) that would otherwise rot on city sidewalks.

Now, however, the fruit foodies are taking things a step further. First came Seattle’s “food forest,” with edibles purposely planted in a public park. Now Los Angeles is following suit, with a "public fruit park."

As Patricia Leigh Brown noted in the New York Times, such tasty parks are “part of a growing fruit-activist movement” that includes “pioneers like TreePeople in Los Angeles, which has given away some 200,000 trees, including thousands of fruit trees, since 1983.”

Newer arrivals include “urban space hackers” like the Guerrilla Grafters in San Francisco, who surreptitiously graft fruit tree branches onto purely ornamental trees. Another is the San Francisco Garden Registry, which tracks urban farmers online and, like a fruit dating service, helps them meet and share their surplus harvests. . . . New orchards are springing up in other cities, too, including Chicago, where the Chicago Rarities Orchard Project seeks to preserve forgotten fruit like the pawpaw, and Seattle, where Seattle City Fruit volunteers are liberating orchards long concealed by vines.

more…

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The pregnancy and booze battles — Conflicting advice

2013-05-07T19:14:18Z

What to eat and drink — or not — during pregnancy is a matter of much contention and confusion.

Last fall, a British study found an occasional correlation, depending on genetics, between alcohol consumption during pregnancy and lowered IQs in babies.

But this spring, another British study announced that downing the occasional cocktail while pregnant didn't seem to cause developmental delays.

Both studies used self-reported cohort studies to track alcohol consumption.

Because it’s unethical to do a controlled scientific study on drinking during pregnancy — you can’t randomly assign some pregnant women to imbibe a little, a lot, or none at all — it will always be difficult to declare a “safe” level of alcohol consumption.

Doctors therefore err on the side of caution, telling women what they know is true: no alcohol at all during pregnancy is safe. And, of course, excessive alcohol consumption clearly causes the array of severe developmental problems known as fetal alcohol syndrome. But in between? Nobody really knows.

from Sift

GM salmon, still waiting — Will the FDA approve it this spring?

2013-05-02T21:20:46Z

Here on Culinate, we’ve tracked the saga of GM salmon over the past few years. The most recent public-comment period with the FDA on the fish — the AquAdvantage salmon, produced by a company called AquaBounty — ended on April 26.

Plenty of food activists have come out against the concept of a GM fish, including Wenonah Hauter of Food & Water Watch and Ocean Robbins of the Food Revolution Network. Their arguments include the environment (fish farming harms ocean waters, and escaped fish breed with their wild relatives) and health (we don’t know how eating genetically modified food affects the human body).

Meanwhile, in January the state of Alaska — home to the biggest wild-salmon fishery in the U.S. — introduced an anti-GM-salmon resolution. And in March, a number of grocery chains, including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and PCC Natural Markets, announced that they would not sell GM salmon if it came to market.

Others — notably the science writer Emily Anthes, author of the new book Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts — have declared that GM fish are a good thing, chiefly because they reduce pressure on wild fisheries. (Anthes also argues that the biotech industry will abandon the U.S. if its products don’t get approved here; in other words, GM livestock are inevitable somewhere on the planet.)

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Swine nation — Feral pigs run amok

2013-04-30T17:42:57Z

Ever seen a boar? They don’t look much like their soft, pink, cute, porcine relations inside the farm fence; they’re dark and hairy, with fearsome tusks. They’re aggressive, digging up crops and occasionally attacking humans. And, according to recent reports in the New York Times and the new ag mag Modern Farmer, they’re taking over the world.

In the U.S. alone, noted the Times, the feral-pig population has ballooned from under 2 million in 1990 to more than 6 million today:

The swine are thought to have spread largely after escaping from private shooting preserves and during illegal transport by hunters across state lines. Experts on invasive species estimate that they are responsible for more than $1.5 billion in annual agricultural damage alone, amounting in 2007 to $300 per pig. The Agriculture Department is so concerned that it has requested an additional $20 million in 2014 for its Wildlife Services program to address the issue.

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Cooking classes for all — There's a class out there for you

2013-04-29T18:19:02Z

Americans don’t know how to cook. Our ignorance — lamented by, among others, Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman — has been blamed for our love of junk food, our preference for enormous servings of everything, and our obesity epidemic.

All across the country, though, activists are trying to empower us to learn how to cook real food. They range from the higher end (foodie courses for busy doctors) to the technologically savvy (online cooking lessons) to the classic (the in-home cooking class) to the demographically specific (programs for seniors and Native Americans) to the grassroots (outreach offerings at, among other places, food banks and church centers).

As food writer Hannah Wilcox noted in a Civil Eats blog post about a food-bank class run by Cooking Matters, even the most basic info needs to be learned at some point: not just how to cook, but how to shop. Cooking Matters offers cooking classes for all ages (including kids), but they also offer store tours, which “teach people how to inspect labels, shop for whole grains, and calculate unit pricing.”

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Corn, corn, everywhere — It ain't going away

2013-04-25T22:29:02Z

Thanks to folks like the journalist Michael Pollan (in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and filmmakers Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney (with their documentary “King Corn”), we’ve all been educated in the many, many ways corn rules our diets, grocery stores, and governments. But there’s still corn work being done out there.

In March, Jonathan Foley, the director of the Institute on the Environment, posted an essay on Ensia (and also Scientific American) about the pervasiveness of corn in America:

It is important to distinguish corn the crop from corn the system. As a crop, corn is highly productive, flexible, and successful. It has been a pillar of American agriculture for decades, and there is no doubt that it will be a crucial part of American agriculture in the future. However, many are beginning to question corn as a system: how it dominates American agriculture compared with other farming systems; how in America it is used primarily for ethanol, animal feed, and high-fructose corn syrup; how it consumes natural resources; and how it receives preferential treatment from our government.

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Paper over pixels — Why cookbooks are (sometimes) better

2013-04-23T17:43:56Z

Over on The Kitchn, regular contributor Dana Velden recently posted a mash note to cookbooks — the old-fashioned print-on-paper kind, that is. Sure, it’s nice to be able to find thousands of recipes with a few keystrokes, but sometimes, Velden wrote, it’s better to have the limited choice of a few printed books.

Books (at least those with decent photography) are visually more satisfying than a screen, Velden added. A book by a single author is full of that author’s voice — something often missing from website aggregations (although not, obviously, from classic single-author blogs, such as Orangette or Smitten Kitchen). And, finally, if you love classic cookbook writers such as Jane Grigson and Richard Olney, their work can be hard to find online.

Plus, it’s always good to have a few books on hand for those nights when the Internet is down.

from Sift

Low-carbon recipes — Cleaner food for Earth Day

2013-04-22T21:49:18Z

For several years now, the food-service company Bon Appétit has been celebrating Earth Day with an event dubbed Low Carbon Diet Day. The idea is to try to reduce your food's carbon footprint by buying, preparing, and eating locally or more efficiently produced food.

This year, the company generated carbon-friendly recipes: an almond-fruit smoothie, a cheeseless pizza, and an edamame burger with carrot-peel topping. (Almonds, for example, may not be local to where you live, but the production of almond milk generates fewer greenhouse gases than cow’s milk.) Check ‘em out!

from Sift

Seed diversity — Preservationists in action

2013-04-22T13:58:21Z

In honor of today’s Earth Day celebrations, here’s a roundup of info about seed diversity. (What’s that again? Oh, right: making sure the planet’s food crops don’t dwindle down to just a few vulnerable species.)

As the environmental journalist Simran Sethi pointed out at her February TEDx talk titled "The Buried Beginnings of Food," some 75 percent of crop varieties have vanished since 1900. That’s nothing, argues Fast Company; by another reckoning (including a cool infographic), 93 percent of our seed types have disappeared.

For another visual take on the issue, check out the Guardian’s photo essay about crops around the world. And for basic info about the problem, here are a few nonprofits working to keep us fed in the future: the Global Crop Diversity Trust, Seed For All, and the Canadian Seeds of Diversity.

from Sift

Smelly cells — The entire body can respond to odors

2013-04-19T16:58:32Z

From the cutting edge of science comes this wacky scent report: Cells throughout our bodies have the same odor receptors as those in our noses.

“It opens the door to questions about whether the heart, for instance, ‘smells’ that fresh-brewed cup of coffee or cinnamon bun,” reported the website Science Daily.

The research field even has a name: sensomics, which “focuses on understanding exactly how the mouth and the nose sense key aroma, taste and texture compounds in foods, especially comfort foods like chocolate and roasted coffee.”

from Sift

Bacterial news flashes — From NPR's food blog, The Salt

2013-04-18T20:29:35Z

From National Public Radio’s food blog, The Salt, come these food-safety tidbits: Sticking food in the freezer may not kill as many germs as you’d hoped. Scientists have mapped the many microbes that hang out on our produce. And yes, hard data is now in that the overuse of antibiotics in livestock is directly connected to the rise in antibiotic resistance in humans.

In other words, frozen hamburger meat can still harbor live E. coli bacteria. (Yes, unfortunately: an outbreak of E. coli has been traced to frozen food.) “Freezing does slow down the microbes that cause food to spoil, but it’s pretty much useless for killing dangerous bugs,” wrote Nancy Shute. (In fact, freezing preserves germs so well that scientists have tried to track down the deadly 1918 influenza virus by digging up the frozen bodies of people who died from it.) Want to be sure the germs are dead? Use heat, not cold.

more…

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Hard times — Figuring out what to eat is so tricky

2013-04-16T19:06:04Z

Last summer, the blog Northwest Edible Life ran a post titled “The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater.” In a wry, profane, darkly satirical vein, the post complained that it was practically impossible to eat correctly, since every food is wrong in some way:

As you read more you begin to understand that grains are fine but before you eat them you must prepare them in the traditional way: by long soaking in the light of a new moon with a mix of mineral water and the strained lacto-fermented tears of a virgin.

Going gluten-free because you think it will improve your health? Please don't, pleaded a celiac sufferer recently on the website Jezebel; when people think gluten-free is a choice, not a health necessity, it makes it harder for those who are truly gluten-intolerant.

Ditching grains because you’ve heard they’re inflammatory? There’s debate over whether all grains are inflammatory, or just refined grains such as white flour and white rice.

more…

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Money woes — The farm bill and the sequester

2013-04-15T16:10:29Z

In honor of Tax Day — that’s today, in case you had forgotten — let’s take a brief look at two of the biggest federal money problems: the Farm Bill that expired last year, and the budget sequester that kicked in early this year. (Or, for you grammar diehards, the sequestration.)

We’re currently operating under a partial extension of the 2008 Farm Bill; the extension runs through September 2013. In the meantime, here’s a brief history of the 2012 Farm Bill from the National Young Farmers’ Coalition — “a case study in how not to produce a bill.”

As Dan Imhoff has pointed out, the Farm Bill doesn’t just affect farmers; it affects all Americans who have ever used (or ever will use) SNAP, the food-stamp program. In 2012, that was one in five Americans, or some 65 million people. SNAP was recently reduced in order to partially fund the Child Nutrition Act. Both programs date back to the 1960s, and both are struggling today.

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The beef-stroganoff affair — Yvonne Brill's obituary goes viral

2013-04-12T19:06:26Z

Yvonne Brill wasn’t exactly a household name. But her death in late March — or, more precisely, her New York Times obituary on March 30, written by Douglas Martin — turned her into a viral meme.

As Amy Davidson pointed out on her New Yorker blog, the print edition of the obit opened with applause for Brill’s domestic skills:

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

You won’t see that original version of the obit, though, in the online version:

She was a brilliant rocket scientist who followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

As Margaret Sullivan, the Times’ public editor, noted, not only did the blogosphere light up with accusations of sexism, but the switch came in for criticism, too, for continuing to emphasize traditional gender roles. Sullivan, as always, had good points to make:

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The secrecy police — Why is it so hard to find out what's really going on with our food?

2013-04-11T14:43:29Z

In a recent Huffington Post piece, the food activist Raj Patel revealed that he’d gotten himself kicked out of a Publix supermarket for asking how the store’s tomatoes were produced.

“There are some things one just isn’t allowed to do in a Publix supermarket,” he sighed. “Asking politely about tomato farmworker justice is one of them.”

Need the deets on farmworker rights? Patel gave a quick summary: “Agricultural and food corporations have successfully lobbied for farmworkers to be stripped of the workplace laws that protect most other Americans, and there’s little enforcement of the few legal protections that farmworkers are meant to enjoy. The result has led to actual cases of ‘modern-day slavery’ in which farmworkers have been threatened, chained, beaten, and held against their will in debt bondage.”

Similar conditions are true for workers on factory farms and in slaughterhouses. Those venues are also the site of much animal cruelty, often brought to the public’s attention via surreptitious filming.

more…

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Broken bees — The worst year yet for honey bees

2013-04-10T15:27:47Z

Honey bees have been suffering for a long time now, battered by disease, parasites, fungus, herbicides, pesticides, and just plain mysterious die-offs. This spring, the problem appears worse than ever, with some 50 percent of honey-bee populations succumbing over the winter. (In previous years, up to a third of bee populations had died.)

Honey bees are important, since they pollinate most of the crops we rely on for food. AlterNet recently ran an article calling for a ban on neonicotinoids, the pesticides believed to be especially dangerous to bees. Britain and the European Union are tussling over a possible ban, while the Environmental Protection Agency is conducting a five-year study on the pesticides. Meanwhile, bees are dying; as a result, grocery prices are likely to rise.

By the way, if you buy imported honey, double-check it; two of the nation’s largest honey packers recently admitted to importing cheap Chinese honey via southeast Asia and relabeling it to make a quick buck.

from Sift

The do-gooders — Grocery stores and food forests

2013-04-09T14:29:38Z

If you’re a fan of the television show "The Wire," you’ve probably already heard: Wendell Pierce, an actor who played a key role on that program, is opening grocery stores in New Orleans. Pierce — a Nawlins native who currently stars in the New Orleans-based show "Treme" — has dubbed his supermarket chain Sterling Farms, and is expressly targeting the city's food deserts.

After all, while the city's restaurants have rebounded from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, its grocery stores have not — and especially not in the city’s poorer neighborhoods:

Sterling Farms will look like most other conventional grocers, with a deli, bakery, seafood counter and as many as 40,000 items. But it also will cater to the special needs of low-income shoppers. The store will offer a free shuttle to anyone who spends $50 or more, so they need not walk or take the bus with heavy bags.

Meanwhile, the city of Seattle is bringing fresh food to the masses in a different way: by filling a public park with edible plants free for the harvesting. The park will include “walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more.” The concept, dubbed a "food forest," will get underway this summer on a seven-acre plot in one of the city’s less wealthy neighborhoods.

from Sift

Food & drink, again — The NY Times speeds up its annual ritual

2013-04-08T17:14:02Z

Seems like it was only yesterday that we were flipping through the pages of the New York Times’ annual Food & Drink issue. (Actually, it was last October.) But really: yesterday, it turned up again.

The April 7 issue offered a sprinkling of articles about food politics: Mark Bittman and his take on healthful fast food, Camas Davis and her Portland Meat Collective, and Bill Heavey and his efforts to hunt, kill, and cook his own dinner.

The rest of the issue, however, followed glossy magazine pattern: restaurants and chefs, bars and drinks, trendy travel destinations, and other foodie favorites. The best of these is an esoteric profile of a maker of high-end spice blends that gives an entertaining history of the spice trade.

from Sift

Kickstarting your food project — Using the Web to raise dough

2013-04-04T22:27:07Z

Lately, we’ve noticed, a number of Culinate contributors have popped up on Kickstarter, raising funds for various projects. Former blogger Sarah Gilbert pulled in funding for her parenting magazine, Stealing Time. Former columnist Matthew Amster-Burton got his latest book project, a memoir about eating in Japan, greenlighted via the site.

Now contributor Camas Davis is hooking dough to replicate her Portland Meat Collective across the nation. (And yes, we here at Culinate have been happy to contribute to all of these endeavors.)

Even if most Kickstarter projects focus on tech products, the site’s Food category is a busy one, with hopefuls plugging everything from homemade sauce to beer to cookbooks to urban-farming projects. Entrepreneurs beware, however; not every project gets funded, of course, including a recent attempt at drumming up cash for Food Politic magazine.

from Sift

The skinny on skim milk — It might not be so great for kids after all

2013-04-02T19:12:45Z

For the past few decades, the low-fat-is-good mantra has dominated dietary health advice in the U.S. The USDA has long recommended consuming low-fat or nonfat milk, and the same is true of milk requirements for national school-lunch programs.

Now comes word, though, of a recent scientific study debunking the conventional wisdom. The study — reported in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood — found an association between the consumption of skim and low-fat milk and the development of obesity in preschoolers:

The findings challenge a recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Heart Association (AHA) that all children drink low-fat or skimmed milk after age 2 to reduce their saturated fat intake and avoid excess weight gain.

The idea that skim milk may not be so beneficial isn't new. What is new, however, is the idea that it might be somehow harmful:

DeBoer says when they broke down the data into the different types of milk with increasing fat content, the findings were even more striking. As BMI scores went up among the kids, the amount of fat in the milk they were drinking went down. “So the ones drinking skim were by far the heaviest, and those drinking whole milk were the lightest,” he says.

more…

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No foolin' — Maple-tree technology

2013-04-01T17:39:48Z

Back in 2005, National Public Radio ran a now-classic April Fool’s news story about how New England's untapped maple trees were exploding.

What’s not a joke, however, is the fact that climate change is shrinking the sugaring-off season. So it was interesting to read in the New York Times about high-tech ways to get more from maples:

As a result, United States maple syrup production hit a new high in 2011. In Vermont, the top-producing state, sap yield per tap has risen over the past decade.

As for that bacon-flavored mouthwash to go with your pancakes? That’s one of this year's fooled-ya gags.

from Sift

GMO labels in the grocery store — Whole Foods calls for a revolution

2013-03-28T22:22:16Z

Earlier this month, the Whole Foods grocery chain announced that, by 2018, it would label all genetically modified food sold in its stores.

Reaction to the announcement was mixed. The New York Times editorial board didn't think much of the idea, pointing out that many manufacturers already label their products as GMO-free, and that anything certified organic must also be GMO-free. The website DailyFinance, however, opined that Whole Foods is a trendsetter, and that where it goes, other grocers will follow.

And if you’re not sure what the whole GMO-labeling thing is all about, check out the recent feature in E — The Environmental Magazine from food-politics activist Dan Imhoff, spelling out the history of the GMO wars.

from Sift

The pig protectors — A animal-welfare campaign

2013-03-25T20:10:21Z

The latest thorn in Walmart’s side is an activist nonprofit called Mercy for Animals. The organization has started a website, dubbed Walmart Cruelty, that targets the megaretailer’s industrial pork supply. (Be warned: the website features some truly shocking video footage.)

MFA protesters have demonstrated at Walmart stores in Chattanooga and Nebraska, and have started a Change.org pig-cruelty petition that, so far, has garnered more than 88,000 signatures.

Other campaigners have put up similar petitions, including petitions asking Domino's Pizza, Hormel, and Johnsonville Sausage to end the use of pig gestation crates.

As the Chattanooga Times Free Press noted, the tide already seems to be turning against pig gestation crates: “Nine states have banned the use of gestation crates, including Arizona, Ohio and Michigan. Some retailers, including McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Kroger and Costo, have agreed not to use gestation crates.”

Walmart, of course, is the big kahuna. Mercy for Animals picked Walmart, according to the paper, for just this reason: “The group is targeting Walmart because the company is a leading retailer with the power to change the supply chain, Letten said. He’s got 22 more stops in his national tour. ‘But,’ he said, ‘we’ll cut the tour short if Walmart does the right thing.’”

from Sift

Food-waste apps — How to get the most from your food

2013-03-21T20:45:12Z

As Claire Thompson recently pointed out on Grist, America does food to the extremes: We waste some 40 percent of our food, even while a sixth of the country struggles with food insecurity.

For those of us who can afford the technology, however, a number of apps are coming out to help prevent food waste. Thompson lists Food Cowboy, which helps companies donate food more efficiently, and Zero Percent, which helps nonprofits take advantage of retail food waste. She also discusses Food Star and the Urban Food Initiative, two projects aiming to reduce the waste on farms and at grocery stores.

Then there are the meal apps, which aim to cut down on food waste via better planning. There are, of course, plenty of extant meal-planning apps — including the menus and the grocery-list generator in Culinate’s own How to Cook Everything app, and the upcoming Five Plates app from Culinate contributor Melissa Lion.

more…

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The scope of poverty — It's not just about soda

2013-03-19T19:51:57Z

In a recent Big City column in the New York Times, Ginia Bellafante offered an unusual but compelling historical comparison: between New York City’s handling of the Typhoid Mary situation back in the early 1900s, and the city’s current attempts to regulate soda consumption.

Bellafante’s take? That the city is making the same mistake twice: first by essentially locking up typhoid carrier Mary Mallon for the rest of her life, and second by trying to prevent soda from being sold in large cups. Both cases revolve around diseases of poverty, and in both, the city has attempted a narrow solution instead of addressing the vast underlying problem:

The articulated goal should not simply be to create a population of poor people who are thin, but to create a population of poor people who are less poor. . . . It is hard not to wonder whether Mr. Bloomberg’s soda-limit initiative might have garnered more enthusiasm . . . if it had been delivered within the context of a more consistent and compassionate message about the city’s commitment to the underserved.

from Sift

A history of food and water — Two articles explore technology and science

2013-03-18T18:27:29Z

The March 18 issue of the New Yorker has two food-related articles. The first, Jane Kramer's riff on Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork — a history book recently reviewed on Culinate — is a combination book review, critical essay, and personal memoir built around the history of food technology:

It’s been said that the kitchen was invented when cooking moved indoors. This was a long process. The first kitchens were solitary structures, built far enough from your house to contain a sudden fire. Then they moved to a courtyard, or to a room across the courtyard from where your family lived, and, eventually, like the big Roman-orgy kitchens, to the cellar. In any event, your food was at best tepid by the time it reached the table. It took millennia to bring kitchens safely to where they are now — at most, a pantry away from the dinner table.

The second, David Owen's article about Florida's deadly sinkholes, includes a section explaining how the planet’s aquifers — the source of much of our fresh water — will be adversely affected not just by our direct demands on them (for drinking water, agriculture, and the like) but by climate change.

more…

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Hungry Americans — A new documentary

2013-03-16T01:25:30Z

The folks who made “Food, Inc.” have a new documentary out. Titled "A Place at the Table" — and subtitled “One Nation. Underfed.” — the film studies America’s shameful inability to feed itself, both in quantity and in quality. It’s showing in limited release, but you can also download it from iTunes and watch it on demand. And you can buy the companion book, take action online, and get food assistance if you need it.

from Sift

Bovine awareness — Better milk, better meat

2013-03-14T14:40:42Z

The latest dairy science news? Milk from grass-fed cows is better for you than milk from feedlot cows.

“Cows on a diet of fresh grass produce milk with five times as much of an unsaturated fat called conjugated linoleic acid than cows fed processed grains,” reported a Harvard study comparing heart-attack rates and CLA dietary rates.

The upshot? The higher your CLA, the lower your risk of having a heart attack.

The problem, of course, is that most cows aren’t raised on grass anymore; instead, we’re intensively raising cows for meat as well as milk, a problem that the Slow Food organization recently tackled with a downloadable pamphlet titled "Too Much at Steak."

“The pleasure that food can bring is being undermined by the harm, hunger, damage to human health and animal welfare concerns caused by the intensive production model,” noted Slow Food’s press materials for the meat guide.

And that’s the underlying argument of both the CLA crowd and Slow Food: Healthy animals help humans stay healthy, too.

from Sift

Supplementary — Should you take calcium and vitamin D?

2013-03-13T17:50:56Z

Late in February, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a scientific-review panel, issued a statement urging caution when taking calcium and vitamin D supplements. The concern? That supplementation may not help prevent fractures, and may also cause kidney stones to develop. Instead, the USPSTF recommended the obvious: getting calcium and vitamin D from a good diet and sunshine exposure.

Of course, not everybody eats a good diet, and folks living farther from the equator don’t always get much direct sun exposure. Nutritionist Marion Nestle wrote up her own take on the panel’s recommendations, comparing them to similar 2011 studies conducted by the Institute of Medicine and the Endocrine Society. She pointed out that the Endocrine Society uses a different gauge of measurement than the IOM, with different criteria for determining whether someone is deficient in vitamin D or not.

So maybe we’re not all so deficient as we’ve been told. Or maybe we are. Either way, Nestle agrees with the USPSTF recommendation: if you’re generally healthy, skip the supplements.

from Sift

Food theory — One magazine offers revisionist ideas

2013-03-12T18:30:02Z

Sunday’s issue of the New York Times magazine bundled a number of otherwise unrelated articles under the topic of Revisionist Food Theories.

First up: A Gretchen Reynolds roundup assessing how the conventional dietary wisdom has changed over the past few decades, from shunning animal fats to (sort of) embracing them, from embracing vegetable oils to (sort of) shunning them, from thinking that optimal cholesterol levels and taking fish oil and maintaining a low weight will save your heart to thinking that well, maybe not so much. Her sum-up? “The truth is, at this point, we don’t truly understand how it all works.”

Second up: An Adam Davidson piece describing how the dieting industry manages to get so much of our money without actually getting us to lose weight: “Game theory suggests that if you want to truly change your behavior, commit and close off those options. But as basic marketing makes clear, the real money is still in the fantasy business.”

more…

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The junk-food police — Sin taxes and bans

2013-03-11T20:15:22Z

Mark Bittman, among others, has long advocated the use of sin taxes on junk food, but so far the idea hasn’t caught on Stateside.

Over in Europe, Denmark has tried and failed to make sin taxes work, while Hungary is currently struggling with implementing the concept. Some manufacturers reformulate their products to avoid the taxes, while consumers often simply buy similar foods that are cheaper (and generally made with even worse ingredients).

On this side of the pond, outright bans on such items as soda pop have been more popular. But it’s not clear if the bans, like the taxes, actually improve health — and now New York City’s soda ban has been repealed, one day before it was due to go into effect.

Marion Nestle, though, thinks the soda ban is a great idea:

So-called “nanny-state” measures — like bans on driving while drunk, smoking in public places and, now, selling absurdly large sugary drinks — help to level the playing field. Such measures are about giving everyone an equal opportunity to live a safer and healthier life.

from Sift

Suspicious seeds — Just in time for spring

2013-03-07T23:07:41Z

If you’re a gardener, you’ve already received seed catalogs in your mailbox. But in Sunday’s New York Times, gardening expert Margaret Roach warned that commercial seeds are often produced in unpleasant ways.

She’s not talking about genetically modified seed, just ordinary seed. But in order to get a plant to the point where its seeds can be harvested for sale, producers may need to use many different chemicals to help that plant along.

Which means not only the possibility of chemical pollution from the get-go, but also the development of seeds that may not do as well when planted and grown in a home gardener’s organic, chemical-free garden.

“In our locavore-centric society, we increasingly ask where every bite of food came from,” wrote Roach. “Since our food (or what our food was fed) comes from seeds, isn’t it time to ask where those all-important embryos, innocent or otherwise, come from, too?”

from Sift

Sickly sugar — A new study links it directly to diabetes

2013-03-06T19:15:48Z

Sugar is bad for you. Sure, this ain’t a new idea. But as Mark Bittman recently wrote in the New York Times, there’s now some scientific evidence to back it up. “It isn’t simply overeating that can make you sick; it’s overeating sugar,” writes Bittman, paraphrasing Robert Lustig, one of the study's scientists.

But on her blog Food Politics, the nutritionist Marion Nestle also tackled the sugar study. “It is tempting to interpret the study as demonstrating that sugar is a risk factor for diabetes independent of calorie intake or body weight,” she writes. “I’m not so sure.” On her blog, she includes graphs from the study, which, she says, aren’t as cut-and-dried as we might think.

Nestle also recently addressed the issue of daily sugar intake and whether the feds should set some sort of maximum daily limit for food labels. As always, her takeaway is just plain common sense: “In the meantime, everyone would be healthier eating less sugar.”

from Sift

Scientists embrace the Mediterranean diet — A study concludes that, yes, it's good for you

2013-03-05T20:48:53Z

In case you missed it last week, scientists have announced what might sound obvious: the so-called “Mediterranean diet” is good for your health.

To be precise, the study concluded that a diet high in fruits and vegetables and low in meat and saturated fat benefits cardiovascular health. The diet is not a low-fat diet, although high-fat dairy products as well as heavily fried and sugared foods are not allowed. Olive oil, fish, and nuts are the fatty stars here.

Wondering if you already follow a Mediterranean diet? The New York Times has an interactive quiz you can take to find out. Meanwhile, excited scientists are hoping the study sparks other comprehensive diet studies.

from Sift

Food politics, published — Two new endeavors

2013-03-04T21:53:00Z

Two new publications devoted to food politics are getting underway this spring.

The first, Food Politic, is an online journal dedicated to, well, food politics, with departments devoted to news, agriculture, policy and technology, and health, among others.

The second, Modern Farmer, is “a print quarterly, website, event series and online marketplace for people who care about where their food comes from.” The first issue is due out in April; in the meantime, the website is a placeholder with a subscription page.

And, of course, there’s always the original food-politics news website: Food Politics, run by Marion Nestle.

from Sift

Seed stories — Grasslands, corn, soy, and patent disputes

2013-03-01T02:40:33Z

A new study has documented the retreat of Midwestern grasslands under fields of corn and soy. This is good news for farmers, who are earning good prices for their crops, but bad news for wildlife (due to habitat loss) and the environment (due to soil erosion):

The images show that farmers in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska converted 1.3 million acres of grassland into soybean and corn production between 2006 and 2011.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case between Monsanto and a farmer who refused to buy new engineered seeds from the company each year. Observers agree that the court seems likely to favor Monsanto, on the grounds of supporting patent rights:

Justice Breyer seemed in a particularly playful mood on Tuesday. At one point he alluded to a notorious line from a 1927 opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in which Holmes sought to justify the forced sterilization of a woman with mental disabilities. (“Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Justice Holmes wrote.) “There are three generations of seeds,” Justice Breyer said, to knowing chuckles. “Maybe three generations of seeds is enough.”

from Sift

Mystery meat — And other tales from the factory

2013-03-01T02:19:48Z

And now, the fake-food news roundup!

Let’s start with the recent European horse-meat scandal, in which horse was labeled and sold as beef. (Europeans have a long tradition of eating horse meat, but it’s generally sold as what it is, not as something else.) Americans have mostly been rattled by the news that IKEA pulled its beloved frozen meatballs from circulation after they were revealed to contain horse. But the bigger health concern is the possible presence of phenylbutazone, a painkiller used on horses but banned from human consumption.

Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an excerpt from a new book by Michael Moss about the history of the junk-food industry. The book, Salt Sugar Fat, details just how precise our snacks can get — and how worrisome they are for our health.

Grist recently published an interview with Melanie Warner, whose new book, Pandora’s Lunchbox, covers much of the same addictive territory as Moss. Warner also just penned an amusing, if disturbing, article for the Washington Post on her adventures with liquid chicken.

more…

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A history of food television — With a side of acerbic wit

2013-02-22T16:16:40Z

Russ Parsons, the Los Angeles Times food writer, has been chuckling a good deal over the sarcastic history of food television penned by Andy Greenwald on the ESPN website Grantland.

Greenwald pegs the 1990s rise of Emeril Lagasse as the fulcrum between old-school food TV (think Julia Child, standing behind a counter) and the current school of hyperactivity: reality shows, cooking competitions, travel extravaganzas, and the like. According to Greenwald, the Food Network in particular decided to emphasize TV over food:

The schizophrenic network seemed committed to the idea of separating its viewership into either cartoony warriors or overmatched civilians, presenting the kitchen as either a battleground or a ticking time bomb. Food itself was either impossibly out of reach or beside the point, like fat floating on the surface of a broken sauce.

This choice, says Greenwald, accounts in part for the career of Anthony Bourdain: “He was never half the chef Emeril was — something he’d be the first to admit — but he was twice as good on camera.”

more…

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Tuna, or not? — More fishy labeling woes

2013-02-21T22:15:10Z

Oceana, the nonprofit that’s been on a campaign to identify mislabeled fish, recently announced that, on average, a third of the fish sold in the U.S. is mislabeled. And that’s on average; some places get the labeling wrong 90 percent of the time.

The most frequently mislabeled fish in Oceana’s study were red snapper and tuna, both endangered species. And don’t think you’ll do better by going to a swanky restaurant; sushi joints were the biggest offenders in the mislabeling department.

Apart from getting hosed at the fish counter, why should consumers worry? Because, as National Geographic’s Ocean Views blog noted, eating the wrong fish can be bad news:

Fish on the FDA’s “DO NOT EAT” list for sensitive groups such as pregnant women and children because of their high mercury content were sold to customers who had ordered safer fish: tilefish sold as red snapper and halibut in New York City and king mackerel sold as grouper in South Florida.

more…

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Cooking basics — Websites that help

2013-02-20T22:17:12Z

To accompany her latest memoir, The Kitchen Counter Cooking School, the food writer Kathleen Flinn last fall set up a companion website titled Cook Fearless. The site includes two different pages devoted to basic cooking lessons. Flinn’s goal isn’t just to help people learn to cook but to help them learn to feed themselves well:

The food industry spends billions of dollars to convince us that cooking is too difficult, it’s something beyond our grasp. The problem is this: if you agree and you don’t cook or you can’t cook, then you leave yourself at the mercy of others to feed you, and increasingly, this falls to multinational companies whose interests are primarily financial.

Plenty of other websites want to help eaters get empowered in the kitchen. They include blogs (the Reluctant Gourmet, Simply Cooking, and Basic Cooking, among others) and articles on magazine websites (Metro Parent, Real Simple, and Martha Stewart, for example). They tell you what tools to get and how to use them, following such techniques as braising, poaching, grilling, and the like.

more…

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Calorie counting — Photo comparisons

2013-02-19T00:31:37Z

In its Food and Cooking department, the online Q&A source wiseGEEK has a set of photos showing what 200 calories looks like for a variety of common foods. Ranging from a few heads of broccoli to a dollop of peanut butter to a handful of gummy bears, the photos illustrate the obvious: calorie-dense foods are small, calorie-low foods are big — sometimes dauntingly so. (Who really wants to eat two-plus heads of broccoli to get 200 calories?)

Some of the photos are a little odd; it takes a while to figure out, for example, that the two competing (but not adjacent) photos of pasta demonstrate that it takes just a handful of uncooked pasta to make a plate of cooked pasta with the same calorie content. The shots of cornmeal and flour aren’t especially helpful, since who’s going to bake with just a few tablespoons of either? Ditto for the bowl of ketchup and the glass of balsamic vinegar; both are condiments used in moderation. Finally, some photo categories seem repetitive; there are far too many shots of processed breakfast cereals and salty or sugary junk foods, neither of which are known for their healthful properties.

more…

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Unprofitable GMOs — Some farmers back off for financial reasons

2013-02-15T17:00:04Z

You can make many an argument against genetically modified seeds, including health, the environment, and concerns about agribusiness monopolies. But good ol’ capitalism may turn out to be the real GMO nemesis.

As Farmers Weekly recently reported, some U.S. farmers are rethinking GM seeds, given their high cost and dwindling yields:

“It’s all about cost benefit analysis,” said economist Dan Basse, president of American agricultural research company AgResource. “Farmers are paying extra for the technology but have seen yields which are no better than 10 years ago. They’re starting to wonder why they’re spending extra money on the technology.”

The ice-cream company Ben & Jerry's is making a similar calculation. According to Food Navigator, the company studied recent research and concluded that not only are GM seeds more expensive than conventional seeds, but the problem of pesticide resistance means greater herbicide use and lower yields. So B&J’s has announced that, by the end of 2013, it will phase out all GM products.

from Sift

Holy produce — Going organic for spiritual reasons

2013-02-14T22:42:35Z

People choose to eat organic food for all kinds of reasons, ranging from health to the environment to supporting local farmers. But as the Oregonian noted recently, some folks choose organic for religious reasons.

These spiritual traditions include eating seasonally (Ayurvedic), mindful eating (Zen Buddhist), being in tune with the planet (Catholic), caring for the earth (Jewish), ecological interdependence (Native American), and good intentions (pagan).

And don’t forget, reminds the pagan Rose Stevens, to honor the deaths of all the things you eat, whether plant or animal, because you might be reincarnated as dinner one day yourself: “I might come back and be that lamb.”

from Sift

Dirty greens — Produce is the leading source of foodborne illness

2013-02-08T22:18:59Z

Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a food-safety report. The report, noted the Huffington Post, is the most comprehensive the CDC has ever done on foodborne illness, covering a decade of tracking outbreaks.

The big reveal of the report was that produce makes you sick more often than animal products. Leafy greens, in fact, are the most common source of foodborne disease, accounting for 1 in 5 cases. Meat, however, is still the deadliest source — not E. coli in beef, but campylobacter and salmonella in chicken and deli meat. And, as the Atlantic Wire reported, oft-maligned shellfish actually causes the fewest incidents of food poisoning.

Some commmentators, worried that the veggies-are-bad message would deter eaters from downing their greens, tried to clarify that washing fruit and vegetables — as well as washing your hands — will prevent transmission of most foodborne illness. Norovirus, for example — the most common cause of food poisoning in the U.S. is most commonly spread by dirty hands touching food, not the food itself.

from Sift

Being fair to farmers — That Super Bowl ad, plus immigration reform

2013-02-07T22:16:24Z

Sure, everybody waits for the famously inventive (and famously spendy) advertisements aired during the Super Bowl. This year, the ad that got everybody talking was one that promoted Dodge trucks by way of the American farmer.

Latinos, who make up the vast majority of farmworkers in America today, were not pleased with the ad’s depiction of craggy white men as the stereotypical American farmer. Subsequently, a Latino group released its own version of the ad using images of Latino farmworkers.

In the Los Angeles Times, Russ Parsons discussed a different take on the ad: Rachel Laudan's essay pointing out that the contemporary American farmer is not only much older than most of the people shown in the ad, but also squeezed economically from all sides:

We may love the image of a charming rustic, but today’s reality is that making enough money to hold on to his land takes a lot more than that. Today’s farmer may well fix his equipment with baling wire and elbow grease, but then he goes online to find out how almond sales are going in India.

more…

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Kale: the champion — Not over yet

2013-02-06T15:37:17Z

So you thought kale was so, like, last year? Turns out it’s still cool, with a Seattle Weekly blogger recently tallying up the top 10 kale dishes served at Seattle-area restaurants. The list includes the obvious (kale chips, kale salad, braised kale) and the wacky (yam and kale pizza, anyone?). The biggest news, though, may be the fact that restaurants are serving so much kale to begin with. Eat your greens, folks.

from Sift

Food for all — A scientist tackles global hunger

2013-02-05T20:41:43Z

Here at Culinate, we’ve been mulling a good bit over an article on food choices by the agronomist Ricardo J. Salvador. (The piece appeared in Green Fire Times, a sustainability-focused publication based in New Mexico.)

Salvador, the director of the Food and Agriculture Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, penned a lengthy essay about our global food issues. He doesn’t mince words about the fundamental problem:

Almost a billion people on the planet — one in eight of us — are hungry. It is meaningless that global food production is sufficient for all of us to eat well (in fact, it is nearly twice the necessary amount) because the fact that food exists doesn’t mean that it is available to all.

The problem is worse in the U.S., in fact, since as Salvador notes, one in six of us go hungry on a regular basis:

They aren’t hungry because there is insufficient food in the U.S. They are hungry because we have created a modernity where food is not a right, where food is manufactured and delivered through a mighty investment that must be recovered and turn a profit, and where food therefore flows to those with economic power. . . . There is already more food produced than necessary for the purpose, yet we see that livestock, biofuel refineries, and American trash bins have priority for this food over the hungry.

more…

from Sift